UPDATED: We are up again.

As many of coComment’s users are also bloggers, we wanted to give you the opportunity to find out about Social Spark, a company that allows boggers to make money by either placing display adss on their blog or by writing sponsored content. Through Social Spark, advertisers are able to target blogs based on conversational topics and make cash sponsorship offers to the bloggers who publish them. As part of the partnership, Social Spark will provide their bloggers with the opportunity to enhance the commenting experience on their blogs through coComment.

In effort to make coComment an even more effective experience, we’re going to be launching similar strategic partnerships in the future. Email us at info@cocomment.com and tell us what other partners you’d like to see coming on board.

The coComment Team

There are two areas we are working on right now:

- Support for our extension: FF3 introduces a new security mechanism for extensions. We have adapted our code to support this and we will release a FF3 compatible extension very soon.

- Javascript issues: Our service, like many others, makes extensive usage of browser side Javascript. FF3 introduced new rules enforcement as well as major modifications in some basic APIs (like JSON). We are currently working on adapting our code whilst still keeping it compatible with other browsers. We will keep you informed on the progress of this task.

This means that, right now, you will almost certainly experience compatibility issues with coComment if used with Firefox Version 3. We would therefore recommend that you DO NOT UPGRADE yet.

If you absolutely need to use Firefox 3 then you can still use the coComment bookmarklet bookmarklet to capture your comments.

Please stay tuned for more news.

If this is your first encounter with Marina, she is Wired’s #1 Sexy Geek, is a regular guest on Maxim Radio and Bill O’Rilley, and was mentioned in Cosmopolitan Magazine as one of the top 3 channels on YouTube - as her tag-line at the beginning of her videos states “Intelligence is Sexy.”

What is the “31 Day Comment Challenge”?
One of the organizers, Sue Waters from Edublogs told us they created the contest with the goal to “showcase the importance of commenting on blogs, as it’s a crucial aspect of blogging conversations for achieving the greatest learning”. The experience is fun and the contest has had great momentum thus far, not to mention the cool prizes!

Anyone can join the contest — educators, school students, non-profit bloggers, corporate bloggers etc. In fact the best part of the challenge is you don’t have to be a blogger! Just add your name to the Comment Challenge Wiki (or if unsure how to add your name leave a comment on this post here and Sue will add it for you).

We hope you check it out and start commenting!

Here is the info on the event:

• Date: Thursday, April 10, 2008
• Time: 6:30 pm - midnight
• Venue: Vanguard, 6021 Hollywood Boulevard, Hollywood map
• Facebook Event
• Photo/Flickr Tag: PopCrunch2008

This should be a LOT OF FUN!

Marina will be asking random people if the know the correct origins of some common words and phrases.. we will be videotaping it and uploading the video LIVE during the event! We will also upload the answer videos at around 9pm.

Be sure to come here during the event to blog with Marina live.. or, perhaps we’ll see you at the event in person!

PopSugar TechCrunch

-Marina - HotForWords

In that time, we have transformed what was a concept into a company with a very different (and much larger) product set, built a team of 22 people and acquired over 1.15million users.

However, in all that time, we’ve not made a cent/penny/grivna in revenues nor have we sought to do so. The funding from coComment has come solely from its investors.

For us, 2008 is a critical year. It is the time when we need to go from ‘promising startup’ to ‘viable business’ and a key part of that is starting to generate revenues. We want to do so in a manner that does not alienate our users nor distract them from what they want to do with coComment.

We have therefore started running advertising on the site, in our feeds to others sites and in coComment windows. I know, of course, that most people would prefer to see advertising-free services but the reality is, of course, that ultimately we cannot provide the service to you without generating revenues.

I also want us to offer our users the opportunity to have an ad-free service for an annual fee of $5.

I’ve seen some comments on other blogs … but not many. I therefore wanted to raise the issue here so that everyone has an opportunity to respond and let us know what they think. We’re all in favour of conversations so we’re happy to start one about this and get your views.

Best regards,

Matt.

Why are we doing this?
Starbucks launched their “The Way I See It” campaign as way of creating conversation. Putting supposedly interesting quotes on coffee cups only created controversy that Starbucks was ultra-liberal and looking to promote a political agenda. coComment, a service which allows you to enjoy the full potential of comment-based conversation on the web, is taking a stand to promote real conversations the old-fashioned way – by buying people a cup of coffee and asking them to complete thought-provoking sentences on their Web site (http://www.cocomment.com). Coffee drinkers can finish sentences such as “if I learned definitively that God does exist, I would _____” and “if I could name my own presidential candidate, it would be______” along with four others that people can finish online and review other people’s ideas. coComment team will be available at the event for interviews and talk about better conversations on the Web, or just email me at kristina@cocomment.com

Thanks
Kristina